Nathan Hale

Nathan Hale grew up one of twelve children of Deacon Richard Hale and Elizabeth Strong in Coventry, Connecticut, two years behind his brother Enoch and four generations removed from a great-grandfather who had presided over the Salem witch trials. The brothers entered Yale together in 1769, Hale not yet fifteen, and he graduated in 1773 with first-class honors, having spent his evenings in the Linonian Society debating astronomy, literature and the ethics of slavery. He took a schoolroom in East Haddam, then one in New London, teaching boys arithmetic and the classics by day and, by one account, girls before sunrise so the class would not compete with his regular hours. His teaching contract expired in July 1775, three months after Lexington and Concord.

Hale enlisted in the Connecticut militia that same month, made captain within a year, and joined Knowlton's Rangers, the reconnaissance unit Washington formed after the retreat from Long Island. That fall he volunteered for a mission behind British lines in New York, was caught within days, and was hanged as a spy the next morning. BriefHistory tells that story and the line he is remembered for saying at the gallows. What follows here is the man behind it: the face nobody actually recorded, and the relative some historians think turned him in.

No portrait of Hale was made in his lifetime, so every statue and coin since has reconstructed a face from other men's memories: fair skin, flaxen hair, dark eyebrows, a build agile enough that comrades recalled him clearing Bowery rooftops with a kicked football. He had no training for the mission that killed him and made an amateur's mistake, crossing into British-held territory with his actual Yale diploma in his coat, his real name printed on it. Who exposed him is still argued. One account has a British ranger tricking a confession out of him over tavern drinks; another names his own first cousin, Samuel Hale, a Loyalist serving in the British commissary in the same city. His body was never found. His family raised a stone cenotaph over the empty grave in Coventry, and it still stands.

The monuments arrived faster than any settled account of the facts. Frederick MacMonnies's bronze went up in New York's City Hall Park in 1893, Bela Pratt's version followed at Yale two decades later and was recast for half a dozen campuses and federal buildings, and Coventry had already raised a forty-five-foot obelisk on his birthplace in 1846. A Broadway drama built around his last hours opened in 1899 and toured for more than a year. Schools, college dormitories, a Cold War ballistic-missile submarine and fife-and-drum reenactment units carry his name today, an unusually large memorial architecture built around a face nobody who watched him die ever bothered to describe.

Nathan Hale's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Continental Army commission other
  Commissioned captain, 7th Connecticut Regiment, January 1, 1776 1776
• Knowlton's Rangers mission
  Founding member of Washington's first organized reconnaissance unit 1776
• Union School teaching post, New London other
  Taught boys by day and reportedly girls before sunrise 1774
• Long Island intelligence mission mission
  Volunteered to gather British troop positions behind enemy lines 1776

• June 6, 1755 aged 0 Born in Coventry, Connecticut
• 1769 aged ~14 Enters Yale College with his brother Enoch, age fourteen
• 1773 aged ~18 Graduates Yale with first-class honors
• July 1775 aged 20 Teaching contract in New London expires; enlists in the Connecticut militia
• January 1, 1776 aged 20 Commissioned captain in the 7th Connecticut Regiment
• Summer 1776 aged ~21 Joins Knowlton's Rangers, the newly formed reconnaissance unit
• September 12, 1776 aged 21 Crosses Long Island Sound to begin the intelligence mission
• September 21, 1776 aged 21 Captured near Flushing Bay, Queens
• September 22, 1776 aged 21 Executed in Manhattan at twenty-one

• George Washington 1732–1799
  First President of the United States and commander of the Continental Army during the American Revolution. commanded
• Benedict Arnold 1741–1801
  Continental Army general whose plot to surrender West Point made his name the American synonym for treason. opposed
• Allen Dulles 1893–1969
  Longest-serving CIA director who built the agency's covert operations capacity during the early Cold War. claimed as forebear by